Monthly Archives: April 2014

Wrapping it up and putting a bow on top

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in A Lonely Magic

≈ 3 Comments

Holy cow, the edits on A Lonely Magic have been immense. I wish I knew whether they’d made the book better. At this point, I am so close to it that I definitely can’t see the forest for the trees–the trees that are made of words like “looked” and “seemed” and “eyes narrowed” and “nodded” and “sighed.”

I have to turn it over to the editor tonight (or possibly tomorrow–I told him I’d send it on April 29th, so he’s not expecting it until then and I know he’s been in the middle of a big project himself.) If I had more time, I would definitely use it. More edits and more edits and more edits! But maybe it’s better this way. I can let go of it for a while and let other people look at it and work on it.

I’m in an interesting mental space about it, though. With Ghosts, I felt like I’d written a nice little story. Sure, it could be better, but it was the best I could do at the time, and good enough to share with the people I thought would have fun reading it. I figured my family and friends would buy it out of loyalty (probably not ever read it, though!), and my dozen or so Eureka fanfiction friends would read it out of interest and that would be it. With Thought, I felt a lot more pressure, but my life was also a complete mess and I felt obligated to finish it somewhere within the range of time that I’d said it would be done. I let go of it feeling satisfied that I’d done the best I could do in the circumstances and that it was a fair value to a reader at the price. With Time, I might very well have stuck the manuscript onto a hard drive and in a drawer somewhere were it not for my lovely beta readers. If people hadn’t liked it, I wouldn’t have kept working on it.

With ALM–well, technically, I’m done. I could publish it within a couple of weeks pretty easily if I felt so inclined. But I might not. I might keep revising. I might add more scenes. I might delete scenes. I might move characters around. For the first time, I’m not thinking “good enough” and “the best I can do” are sufficient. I feel like I’ve imagined a world which could be so much fun to play in for such a long time that I really, really want it to be as amazing on the page as it is in my head. Good enough isn’t, I want it to be great. And if it’s not, then I think I want to keep trying to make it better. I might have to become a better writer first, though, and that’s sort of easier said than done.

Meanwhile, though, I should get back to it. I’ve got one chapter half-finished with minor rewrites, one that needs major, major work and two more that I think are close to done. That’s a lot to do today!

Happy Monday

21 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in A Lonely Magic, Anxiety, Personal

≈ 2 Comments

I was walking the dogs this morning–on a rather beautiful, slightly cool, very green April day–when I realized that my mind was telling me stories again, specifically a conversation between Fen and Javier which is going to make Ch25 so much better. Yay!

For the past few weeks, my brain has been caught on a hamster wheel of college plotting and planning and financial calculations and frustration. In the daydream-y moments when I’m usually lost in my story-world, I’ve been stuck in a not very pleasant set of realities. Most days I still worked on the book, but it’s been slow and painful, the words dragging and dull. Yesterday, though, we paid the deposit for New College of Florida and filled out the financial aid paperwork and stuck the forms in the mail, and now my brain appears to have jumped off that unpleasant hamster wheel and moved back to Syl Var. Whee!

This week, I’m going to finish the revisions, one way or another. Next Monday, the book goes off to the editor. Next Tuesday, I start writing the next one. This month has been a rough spell, but that thought makes me happy!

Parenting 101

12 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by in Personal

≈ 8 Comments

Parenting 101: A parent’s job is not to make her child happy.

Apart from the difficulty of making other people happy, anyway–trying to control other people’s emotions is pretty much always doomed to failure–happiness, as a goal, is much too transient, much too shallow.

R was probably no more than two years old the first time I had to suffer through this lesson. He needed to take antibiotics. He refused to. Brute force wasn’t working anymore and was also really, seriously unpleasant. So I waited him out. Sixteen years later it still sticks in my memory as some of the most miserable hours of my life. It took about two, maybe three, hours of me saying, “The next thing that I am going to do is help you take your medicine,” and “no, sweetheart, you may not have a snack (story, playtime, walk, video, diaper change, NAP!) until you’ve taken your medicine,” until it was finally in him and we never had to do it again. I spent a lot of time wondering in the moment whether maybe threatening to spank him and/or actually spanking him would be less like torture, but in the long run, I had no regrets. He took his medicine after that, every time it came up.

When he was nine or so, I got to be the mean parent again. We moved to Florida. I can vividly remember being in the car with him as he told me that Florida was a place where people came to die and that he didn’t belong here. It made me laugh, but I did feel bad. But we didn’t move here because I thought he’d be happier here–I thought he had a better chance of getting a better education in a state where I could afford a private school for kids with learning disabilities. I was right. But he wasn’t happy about it.

And then when we moved to our current house, he told me no. He didn’t want to go to the school I’d found for him. He didn’t want to move again. I told him I was sorry he felt that way. Because I’m the mom and it wasn’t my job to say, “let me give you everything you want, let me do what you think will make you happy.” It was my job to look at the choices and do my best with my adult knowledge to do the thing that would help him most in his journey to adulthood.

All that ought to be comforting. And it sort of is. But sometimes being the parent is really hard. I wish I could just make him happy.

Hampshire College in Massachusetts is his first choice of school. But they didn’t come through with the kind of financial aid that would make it possible without him accumulating many, many thousands of dollars in debt — well over the $20K that might be reasonable and up into the $50K range or higher. Part of me wants to be a wishful thinker about it — someday maybe I’ll start earning serious money again and be able to help him pay off those debts — but a lot more of me thinks bankrupting your future because you liked the college town environment is absurd. And so I’m being the bad guy.

It’s really hard.

But Parenting 101: It *is* my job to raise him to be a smart, responsible, independent adult, capable of making realistic choices. My wishful thinking would not serve him well. I will survive being the bad guy this one more time. I do hope it’s the last, though. I’m sick of being the bad guy.

Saying Good-bye

05 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by in Grief, Personal

≈ 12 Comments

I keep trying to let this go without words.

It doesn’t work for me.

The last couple of weeks have sucked. I wonder if they always will? Every day I kept thinking of what was happening two years ago. The arrangements. The plane flight. The car ride. The beach. And then the birthday.

Twenty-five years ago, I didn’t celebrate my birthday.

I thought then that it would be the worst birthday of my life. Yeah, so far, I was right. But two years ago, my birthday came a week after Michelle’s memorial service. I don’t know why her death sent me into such a death-spiral of grief and sorrow. Maybe it was just because it was the fourth death in six months. Maybe if she’d died at some safer time in my life it wouldn’t have hit me so hard. But no. No.

She was–is–the only person that I’ve ever thought truly understood me, down to my core, and loved me for who I am. Lots of people love me for who they think I am. I’ve got plenty of love. (Of course I do–I’m crazily co-dependent, tell me you need something and I will do my best to give it to you, no questions asked. It’s the recipe for love.) But Michelle–she saw all of me. And she didn’t ask for anything. She just loved.

Yesterday was her birthday. She would have been 47. She died when she was 44. Her birthday is 4/4. My birthday is 4/7. I want to believe that it will be a magical year–that my birthday year, my 47th, will be special, crazily wonderful in some way I can’t imagine. On your birthday year, all your wishes should come true. But I sort of think that Michelle would have wished for the cancer to go away, once and for all. And instead she died. And me… well, for the past couple of weeks I have just been captured by the sad. I know that there are worse things in life. Hell, all those people in Syria are pretty damn miserable right now. This week, a former colleague of mine got to tell his five-year-old daughter that the bad rocks in her head were back and she was probably going to die. I have nothing, NOTHING, to be sad about.

But I still miss Michelle. I still wish I could talk to her. I still want her to be here, somewhere. I still want to believe that I could reach out and find her somewhere. I’m still… just so sad.